Job Satisfaction Survey Launches Soon

Colleagues,

I am pleased to inform you of an important opportunity you will be offered in the coming days to participate in a survey of faculty job satisfaction. This survey research is part of a national program called the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), which has been operating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 2003. Participation will entail completing a 25-minute, web-based survey; your unique link to the survey will be emailed to you from COACHE in the coming days. COACHE will not use any name or email address for any purposes except for this research. 

While there are many surveys that faculty are asked to complete, this one was designed entirely to determine their current job satisfaction compared to faculty at peer institutions.  Your views are especially important to us as we strive to attract and retain the best and brightest scholars and teachers, increase the satisfaction of all faculty, and to make the University of Denver (DU) a great place to work.

In a process approved by Harvard’s and DU’s institutional review board, COACHE will provide our campus with their summary analysis, as well as the confidential unit-record database, stripped of names and e-mail addresses. The data provided to DU will be received and kept on a secure server by Mike Furno, Assistant Provost for Institutional Research and Analysis, Office of Institutional Research and Analysis. Neither I, nor any other administrator, staff or faculty member outside the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis at DU will have access to the unit-record data. The Office of Institutional Research and Analysis will explore and analyze broad patterns in the data to assist with planning and developing improved academic policies and practices across campus. To protect confidentiality and guarantee that the results of this survey cannot influence personnel decisions about individual faculty members, Institutional Research and Analysis staff will disseminate survey results only with data aggregated in cells of five respondents or more, so that individual faculty and individual departments cannot be identified.  

We welcome this opportunity to learn from an independent, research-driven, comparative study. We believe that DU has the potential to be one of the best places for scholars to work, and with your help we can learn how best to support that goal. However, data from the COACHE study will be meaningful only if we have broad participation.

Within a week, you will receive an e-mail from COACHE (coachefaculty@opinioncast.com), directing you to the online survey. The survey is easy to complete. If you have any questions about the survey, please contact Mike Furno at mike.furno@du.edu or 303-871-2361, or COACHE at coachefaculty@srbi.com.

Thank you in advance for helping us through participation in this study.

Sincerely, 

Jeremy Haefner

Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor

University of Denver